Saturday, June 29, 2013

Facebook admits data breach exposed 6 million users

If you are accessing your Facebook account from a mobile device, chances are you have stored your telephone number in your page, privately or publicly.

This disclosure should be a good reason for you to be alarmed and be prudent with the sort of information you store online:

Facebook has blamed the data leaks on a technical glitch in its massive archive of contact information.

6 million users exposed?

SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook Inc has inadvertently exposed 6 million users' phone numbers and e-mail addresses to unauthorised viewers over the past year, the world's largest social networking company disclosed late Friday.

Facebook blamed the data leaks, which began in 2012, on a technical glitch in its massive archive of contact information collected from its 1.1 billion users worldwide. As a result of the glitch, Facebook users who downloaded contact data for their list of friends obtained additional information that they were not supposed to have.

Facebook's security team was alerted to the bug last week and fixed it within 24 hours. But Facebook did not publicly acknowledge the bug until Friday afternoon, when it published an "important message" on its blog explaining the issue.

"We currently have no evidence that this bug has been exploited maliciously and we have not received complaints from users or seen anomalous behavior on the tool or site to suggest wrongdoing, it's still something we're upset and embarrassed by, and we'll work doubly hard to make sure nothing like this happens again."- Facebook, on its blog.

The breach follows recent disclosures that several consumer Internet companies turned over troves of user data to a large-scale electronic surveillance program run by US intelligence.